Michael Azerrad

The longtime music journalist talks about the music of his life: listening to Talking Heads in a crowded dorm room, visiting Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore's 80s apartment, and coping with Kurt Cobain's death by listening to Portishead.

This album came out in 1964, so I was too young to have bought it or called it my own. Maybe my parents told me to listen to it or played it for me. Or maybe I liked the colorful cover. But I listened to it over and over and over, as little kids do. It engrained these synaptic pathways in my brain for hearing music. It’s like the urtext for me.

New Christy Minstrels were like a pop version of folk music. [The Byrds'] Gene Clark was actually in this incarnation of that group. It’s a lot of old folk songs: John Henry and Paul Bunyan and Casey Jones. Just listening to those stories instilled a strong work ethic in me.

My dad bought the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper’s the week it came out. He’d read about it in Time magazine and thought, “Well, I should investigate this Beatles band.” And I commandeered it. I was around eight. That was huge. I heard that record and I realized, “I’m a rock person. In one way or another, this will be my life."

For my 10th birthday, I got Hot Rocks, and that really solidified my identity as a rock person. I liked the Beatles a whole lot, but the Stones had this dark, forbidden quality. I could sense that there were some real naughty things in their songs that I wasn't really old enough to comprehend yet. The Beatles were something that the whole family liked, but when I put on the Rolling Stones, my mother would say, “Can you turn down that shrieking? That’s that guy that does the St. Vitus dance, isn’t it?” I had to look up what a St. Vitus dance was.

I had gotten the Who's Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy when I was 14 and then saw the Grateful Dead open for them with a friend—my mom drove us out to Oakland Coliseum and picked us up later, which was very nice of her. I was galvanized the whole time, not just by the music, but by but the scene: stoned people dancing and having a good time and unbelievably loud, amazing music. I blundered into Who’s Next and Live at Leeds. Then the Who became my life. There was the aggression 15-year-old boys will gravitate toward, but also a great intelligence and sensitivity that really hit home.

A year later, I moved to New York. A friend of mine came back from a trip to London in the summer of '77 with a box of punk singles and posters, and my head exploded. After that, all the classic rock I was into went out the door. Punk rock—there was nothing else. The only classic rock band that I kept around was the Who.

When this album came out, everyone on my dorm floor was champing at the bit: “What’s it going to sound like?” We’d been hearing rumors that it was going to be spacy and African, crazy things. Then finally, this one guy managed to get a copy before anyone else, and we all jammed into his dorm room. There was this intellectual angle to the Talking Heads, but they were also a gateway to African music. Reading interviews with David Byrne, he mentioned certain groups—Fela Kuti, Sunny Adé—and I investigated them. That album was a portal to non-stop discovery.

Around that time, I was in New York City and I would see giants of new music: Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, Glenn Branca, Laurie Anderson. They were making the music that made them legendary right then, and I saw them all. It was a great moment of New York cultural history, and I just happened to be right there. Remain in Light stands for that whole moment.

By the mid-80s, I’d started writing for this short-lived music magazine called Only Music and I interviewed Sonic Youth around EVOL. Kim and Thurston lived on Eldridge Street [in Manhattan], and to visit them, you had to call up to their house, and Kim would drop the keys to the front door down in a spangly silver glove. They had a big dog and a bathtub in the kitchen. I interviewed Thurston at their dining-room table, and he was trying to describe the music and said, "We just try to make the most intense chains of riffs we can." I kind of tripped up and suggested it was like Live at Leeds—kind of a dumb thing to say. He stopped for a moment and said, "Yeah, actually, yeah!" I never forgot that. That was very kind of him.

I previously had been into post-punk, but Sonic Youth made homegrown, incredibly idiosyncratic, avant music that wasn't really based around skill so much as inspiration. I had been way into punk, and those people "couldn't play" either, but Sonic Youth invented a new way to play. That was a revelation.

You know how the cover of Who’s Next has that monolith on it, and it’s kind of a monolithic record? I think of Nevermind the same way. There’s not one crack in that edifice. It was really new and it expressed so much stuff that I’d felt since I was 10 years old. I knew Bleach, but didn’t really give it a chance. Like the other 10 million people who bought Nevermind, maybe I needed smoother production to get the idea across.

Later on, when I met Kurt, I hit it off with him in the first few moments that we even laid eyes on each other. He said the same thing to me, and I knew that was going to happen because I completely got that music. I understood it so utterly the first time I heard it. I’ve really never had that happen before, or since. [Editor's note: Azerrad's bookCome as You Areand the filmAbout a Son, featuring audio of his interviews with Kurt Cobain, are essential Nirvana documents.]

I was still reeling from Kurt’s death at this point. I didn’t really want to hear too much rock music, so I was listening to Portishead, Tricky, and Beth Orton. A lot of trip-hop. That was a pretty dark time, frankly. That’s just where I was.

I was in a much better frame of mind by then, but the music was really mediocre in 2001. If you look back at the Pazz & Jop poll, the stuff on that list is mostly forgettable. I was fed up with a lot of the hip bands that were just aping the post-punk stuff that I’d listened to in the early 80s. I found that not just incredibly dull but kind of depressing.

This is going to sound terrible, but the record that was really important to me around that time—it wasn't released until later—was the record that my band made. I was in a band called the King of France, and that was the most important band to me at that time. I focused all my energy on it. I started out in that band as a mediocre drummer, and I just willed myself into being good. Not great, but good.

A friend of mine said, "I went to college with said this guy Dave Longstreth, and he has a band called Dirty Projectors that you should check out." I went and saw them at Glasslands [in Brooklyn], and it was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. But I didn’t get it. My friend insisted I see them again. So I did, and it clicked. It was a feeling of newness and discovery and excitement that I had been chasing ever since Hot Rocks, maybe. Just having my brain rearranged by music.

Every time they played New York I saw them. I finally introduced myself to Dave after a show and he said, "I know who you are! You’ve been coming to our shows!" After that, I started to open up to all of the stuff that had been going on in Brooklyn. Dirty Projectors restored my confidence in underground music. I got to be friendly with them and they introduced me to this entire constellation of bands: Delicate Steve, Deerhoof, Buke and Gase, tUnE-yArDs. If there was one band that literally changed my life, it would definitely be Dirty Projectors.

There's this avant-garde trumpeter named Jon Hassell who coined the term “fourth world music.” He called it classical music of the future, which blends digital technology and music from around the world. That’s what tUnE-yArDs does. The best music pushes you into acclimating yourself to embracing sounds or dissonances or rhythms that you previously may not have understood, and that’s been true since Beethoven up through Public Enemy and beyond. Merrill Garbus is a visionary. I love seeing where visionaries lead us.